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Getting to Mozambique takes a long time. On my international flight to the former Portuguese colony on Africa's southeast coast last fall, I sat beside a talkative South African. He was curious why a young, single American woman was in transit to one of the poorest nations on earth.

"I'd like to help," I said simply. I would be staying with a ministry that ran an orphanage, a primary school, and a Bible college to train Mozambican pastors, where I'd be teaching two classes.

He admired my selflessness, but he assured me there was nothing I could do to help Africans.

"You won't find any hope there," he said, "and besides they're happy as they are."

I was confident I would prove him wrong. But when I first arrived in Pemba, a coastal town in rural Mozambique, I thought he might be right. Perhaps Mozambicans were happy.

Every day, smiling African women passed me by, speaking in Makua, their mother tongue. They wore brightly colored fabrics wrapped tightly around their heads and waists, carrying large buckets of water on their heads.

The place where I was staying overlooked the bright blues and greens of the Indian Ocean; the waves crashed loudly against the black rocks, and for a moment I forgot I would be living in voluntary poverty. On the other side of the road, however, were local village houses made of mud and reeds that lacked electricity and basic cooking stoves. The staggering poverty rattled my confidence deeply. The nation has one of the highest infant mortality rates worldwide and 70 percent of its people live on less than $2 a day, the global poverty line. I was driven to find answers to Africa's poverty in preparation for my upcoming postgraduate work in development studies.

My journey did not begin with a lifelong desire to be a missionary to Africa. The desire came when I began realizing there was more to life than the personal comfort in which I had surrounded myself—a graduate degree, a nice car, and a safe job.

I was moving to Africa for selfish and unselfish reasons. Selfishly, I hoped Africa would save me from a life of numbness, a life of seeking mere satisfaction—more money, more recognition, more whatever. I hoped to find it true that less is more.

Unselfishly, I wanted to help the one-sixth of humanity living without basic food, water, and shelter. My heart was touched from continents away.

It was not long before the words of the South African man I met on the plane were challenged. I spent a day with Fatima, a woman from the village, and found that she had no food or money for a meal for her family. Each day, she worried about how she was going to get food.

At the crowded, outdoor village market that smelled of raw fish and refuse, I found that my $2 were enough to buy rice, fish, coconut, onions, garlic, cooking oil, and charcoal for the fire that Fatima made in the dirt outside her one-room house with a dirt floor. After cooking a meal, she sat on a straw mat and ate the smallest amount of food from a plastic plate, because she wanted to be sure her children had enough.

A translator told me: "She doesn't ever want her children to feel they didn't get enough food at home." A few days later, though, Fatima's chubby two-year-old son Johnny was crying from hunger. Her husband had another wife whom he provided for instead. The rural, sun-scorched town in northern Mozambique was mostly Muslim, and many of the men had more than one wife.

When the men in the village asked me if I was married, I wanted to lie and say yes. The truth is that I am a single Gen X-er, and difficulties abounded because of my different culture and language. I've been conditioned to receive rather than to give, trained by a culture that values desire over contentment.

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January 2007, Vol. 51, No. 1